Art & Creativity Quote by Neil Jordan

Stepping away from film to write a novel reads like an artist changing oxygen tanks: same lungs, different atmosphere. Neil Jordan isn’t confessing burnout so much as asserting control over his own tempo. In an industry built on calendars, committees, and financing math, “two years away” is a small act of defiance. It signals that the director’s most precious resource isn’t the camera, it’s authorship.

The subtext is about power. Film, even at its most personal, is negotiated art: producers, actors, budgets, markets. A novel is where Jordan can be sovereign, where tone doesn’t get softened in the edit and narrative risk doesn’t require a greenlight. The line quietly reframes “making films” as labor and “writing a novel” as a return to origin, a reminder that the director is also a storyteller with private appetites that the screen can’t always feed.

Context matters because Jordan’s career has long moved between intimacy and spectacle, the haunted interiority of character and the public machinery of cinema. Taking two years suggests he’s resisting the industry’s demand for constant output and brand coherence. It also hints at a creative recalibration: when you leave the collaborative noise of a set for the solitude of prose, you’re not just changing medium, you’re changing accountability. A novel can fail quietly; a film fails on opening weekend.

It’s a modest sentence with a loaded premise: if you want to protect the strange, you sometimes have to exit the system that rewards the familiar.